Here is an interesting proposition. What if you were a Chief Marketing Officer and through some quirk of magic or miracle of teleportation you found yourself sitting in the not-so-comfortable chair of a telemarketing or customer service operator in one of your offshore call centers in, say…Bangladore? What could you learn about your customers that you didn’t already know? More importantly, what could you do with that information to improve the effectiveness of your marketing communications efforts? How could you leverage the experience of those eight hours of customer selling or servicing face time to your brand’s best advantage?
O.K. Let’s step back from the Twilight Zone for a minute. In a survey released by CustomerSat in May of 2007, 71 percent of the sales and marketing executives polled admitted to having less understanding of why their customers remained loyal to their respective brands than they knew five years ago. Yet they have infinitely more customer information at their disposal. More data. Less understanding. More facts. Less insight. Without that insight they admit that all the data in their CRM systems is useless.
So, given this condition, short of unseating a call center operator, how do you reach your customers with the most effective solutions, value propositions, and brand differentiators without a clear understanding of what works and what does not work? The impact of this question and all of the other questions that may be going without answers right now, is very real. And that is the promise that we believe the advent of our Lean Advertising Theory may fulfill.
This is why with the help of our readers and industry thought leaders we have initiated the development of the Lean Advertising Network, a real-time technology platform that will allow companies to deploy Lean Advertising practices as a back-up to their existing marketing communications procedures. This proof-of-concept effort will provide forward thinking marketing decision makers with suite of management solutions that conform to the practice of Lean Advertising, yet have been proven in their own respective arenas. These existing solutions will be administered by a middleware application that puts the entire network on the desktop for a transparency that is non-existent in today’s Byzantine world of traditional and interactive advertising options.
What Exactly Is A Lean Advertising Network?
If you could go back in time, equipped with what you now know and advantage that knowledge and insight to create the practice we know as advertising, what would it look like, what would it work like, what would it do for you? This was the premise the development team of the Lean Advertising Network began with.
As you know if you have been following this series of articles, we started with the principals of Lean Manufacturing as our architecture. This meant that we had to create a process of advertising that would be engineered to improve upon itself over and over and over again. The development team began their process with the smallest units of measurement possible. Eight people in our office were their first audience. Not customers. Not prospects. Just the people the developers needed to influence.
Next came the product. An Apple. Then they created an ad for the apple. The next step was to develop the media that they would use to reach their audience. The developers put up a bulletin board and tacked the ad up for all to see. “For Sale. One Red Apple. $25.”
Nobody bought the apple. Now real-time analytics were put into play. The developers asked each of the eight people in their audience what it would take for them to buy the apple for $25. Nobody was interested in a $25 apple. This provided the developers with the insight they needed to improve their advertising. The developers changed the price to 25 cents.
Now they had six customers. The developers had to decide whether to buy more apples or revise their ad to turn it into an apple auction. Once again the ad was refined. The ad became interactive with eight response tabs asking who would be willing to pay more than 25 cents for the apple and who felt it was wrong to change the price at all. Five people responded. No one was willing to bid on the apple. Three people suggested the audience initial their tabs and they be put in a hat and the “winner” be drawn.
The ad was revised again to ask if the drawing should be held before or after lunch. No one responded.
The ad was revised yet again to announce that the drawing would be held in ten minutes. Four people submitted their slips for the drawing. The slip was drawn, the apple was sold. Profit and cost were calculated. A questionnaire was sent to all eight members of the audience asking how the developers could improve the process and the product.
Three people filled out the questionnaire saying bring more apples. One said give them a choice between apples and oranges. Two said leave me out of this nonsense, I have work to do.
From this humble beginning the developers created a system that tied in the product development, the supply chain, the advertising development, the media selection, the audience, the audience feedback, the cost and ROI factors, the sales process, the evaluation process, the ability to revise each element of the program based upon what was learned by monitoring those elements and finally the ability to expand the system and incorporate other networks, applications, data sources and multichannel touchpoints in the process. From a simple sign on a bulletin board the developers expanded to email, direct mail, direct response print, web-based media, and finally broadcast. And the first Lean Advertising Network was born. At least in concept. Now the fun begins. Building the proof of concept… for real.
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